Every few weeks an owner writes to me with some version of the same question. They bought an apartment in Roma Norte, Condesa, or Narvarte. They live in Chicago, or Berlin, or in Mexico City but two hours away in traffic. They want to know whether handing over the keys to a management company is worth what it costs.
Disclosure before anything else, because it should change how you read this. I run StayWork CDMX, which rents furnished apartments to guests, and I run Roma Norte Host, which manages apartments for owners. Same operator, both sides of the table. So I have a commercial interest in you hiring a manager, and a good part of this article is about when you shouldn’t.
This is operator experience, not legal or accounting advice. Anything about tax treatment, invoicing, or your obligations as a non-resident owner needs a Mexican accountant, and it needs one before you sign, not after.
Quick answer
Short-term rental management in Mexico City is almost always priced as a percentage, but the percentage is the least interesting part of the quote. What matters is the base it is applied to: gross booking value, or net revenue after platform fees, cleaning fees, and taxes. Two companies quoting the same number can bill materially different amounts on the same month.
Get three things in writing before you sign: the exact definition of the revenue base, an itemised list of what the fee does not cover, and the notice period plus who keeps the listing account and reviews if you leave.
Management does not pay for itself in every case. If you live in the city, have a reliable cleaner, and rent long-term to one tenant, you are probably better off self-managing.
First question: is short-term even the right play for your unit
Before you compare managers, check that you are comparing the right business. Plenty of Mexico City apartments earn more, with far less operational drag, on a traditional twelve-month lease. Short-term wins only when the location, the unit, and the seasonality carry it, and when you are honest about vacancy instead of modelling a full calendar.
Roma Norte Host publishes a short-term versus traditional rental calculator that runs the two side by side for a CDMX unit. Faster than arguing about management fees for a business you shouldn’t be in.
There is also a regulatory layer owners abroad hear about late. Mexico City introduced a host registry, and it changed who can operate cleanly and who is exposed. I covered it from the guest side in is your Mexico City Airbnb legal in 2026 . The owner-side conclusion is simpler: whoever manages your apartment needs to be a registered Mexican business that can issue invoices, or you are inheriting their problem.
The three ways owners actually run an apartment here
Almost every arrangement in this city is a variation on one of three.
Self-managing from abroad. You keep the listing, set the prices, answer messages, and have a cleaner and a handyman on WhatsApp. Cost is your time plus whatever you pay those people directly. It works better than the internet suggests, and worst on the days it breaks: a water heater fails at 22:00 on a Friday, a guest is locked out, or the building administrator wants a signature and you are eight time zones away.
Co-hosting. A partial service, typically the guest-facing work: messages, calendar, pricing, coordinating cleans. You usually still own the listing account, still pay the cleaner and the suppliers, and still handle anything structural. Priced below full management because the co-host absorbs labour, not operational risk.
Full management. The manager runs the apartment as a business: listing and channel management, pricing, guest screening, cleaning and laundry coordination, restocking, maintenance dispatch, reporting, and a monthly payout with a statement. You are an owner receiving distributions rather than an operator with helpers.
The gap between the middle option and the last is where most disappointment lives. Owners buy co-hosting expecting full management, then discover in month two that “we handle the guests” never meant “we deal with the plumber.”
The fee model, and the word that quietly costs you money
Managers here quote a percentage. Fine. The number is not the variable to negotiate first.
Ask what the percentage is applied to, and make them write the answer down. In practice you will see two families:
A percentage of gross booking value. The full amount the guest paid, before the platform takes its cut, and sometimes before cleaning fees are stripped out.
A percentage of net revenue. What actually landed in the account after platform fees, and possibly after cleaning fees and taxes collected.
Those are not the same business relationship. Under a gross model, the manager’s fee is unaffected by what the platform charges, so the platform’s cut comes entirely out of your side. Under a net model you share that exposure.
Then comes the part that is easy to miss and expensive to discover: what counts as revenue at all. Every contract I have read defines it slightly differently. Force written answers to these before you sign:
- Do cleaning fees collected from the guest count toward the base, and if so, who pays the cleaner out of it?
- Do extra-guest fees, pet fees, and early check-in fees count? Do taxes collected through the platform?
- If a guest cancels and the platform still pays out a portion, is a fee charged on it?
- If a booking is refunded after the manager was paid, is the fee reversed?
- Are direct bookings you brought in yourself charged at the same rate?
That last one catches a lot of owners. If your cousin’s company books the apartment for a month and you did the entire deal, does the manager bill on it? There is a defensible answer either way, and it belongs in the contract rather than in an email argument in March.
Do this arithmetic with your own numbers
I am not going to tell you what the market rate is in Mexico City, because I don’t have a defensible dataset for that and neither does anyone quoting you a confident figure over coffee. What I can give you is the shape of the calculation. Substitute real numbers from the actual quotes on your desk.
Take one month. Call the gross booking value G: everything the guest paid, including the cleaning fee. Call the platform’s host-side cut P. Call the cleaning cost you actually pay the cleaner C. Call the quoted management rate R.
Under a gross model, the fee is R x G. Under a net model it is R x (G - P), or R x (G - P - C) if cleaning sits outside the base, which is a definition you have to ask for explicitly.
Compute both for the same month at each manager’s quoted R and compare the peso amounts, not the percentages. Run it again for a strong month and a weak month, because the ranking can flip. Then multiply by twelve. A difference that looks like rounding on one month is a real number on a year, and it repeats every year you stay in the arrangement.
Ask each candidate to produce that calculation themselves. How readily they do it tells you something. A manager who can generate a clean statement on request will have clean reporting when you actually need it, and one who gets vague about the definition of net revenue is showing you their invoice practices in advance.
What each tier actually covers
Scope varies by company, so treat this as a checklist to walk through line by line rather than a description of any particular contract, mine included.
What to expect from each management model in Mexico City
| Area | Self-managed from abroad | Co-hosting | Full management |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guest messaging and screening | You, in your timezone | Usually included | Included |
| Pricing and calendar | You | Usually included | Included |
| Listing creation and photography | You commission and pay | Sometimes advisory only | Often included or arranged at cost |
| Cleaning coordination | You schedule directly | Usually coordinated, you pay the cleaner | Coordinated, billed through or included |
| Laundry and linen | Your problem | Usually your problem | Usually handled, replacement often billed |
| Restocking consumables | You | Rarely | Usually handled, billed at cost |
| Maintenance dispatch | You, by WhatsApp, at night | Rarely included | Included up to an agreed approval threshold |
| Building and administration contact | You | Rarely | Usually included |
| Invoicing and owner statements | You | Rarely | Should be included, ask to see a sample |
| Deposit and damage claims | You | Varies | Usually handled |
Where a company draws these lines is more informative than its headline rate. To put our own cards on the table rather than describe the shape of a number and leave you guessing: Roma Norte Host charges 20% of lodging revenue, with no setup fee and no fixed monthly, and states the exact calculation base along with the treatment of platform fees, cleaning, laundry, taxes, maintenance and reimbursables in the proposal before anything is signed. The full scope sits on the Airbnb management services page .
That figure is useful to you mainly as a reference point for reading everyone else’s. A quoted percentage means nothing until you know what it is a percentage of and what it buys. Whether you hire us or not, that is the level of specificity to demand from every proposal you collect: a published rate, a defined base, and a written list of what falls outside it.
The costs that never appear in the proposal
The management fee is the visible cost. These are the ones that surprise owners in year one, and none of them are the manager’s fault. They are the cost of operating a furnished apartment.
Linen and towel replacement. Turnover destroys textiles on a schedule. Whites stain, elastic goes, and a guest who checks in to grey towels writes about it. Budget replacement as a recurring line, not a one-off purchase at setup.
Deep cleans. A turnover clean is not a deep clean. Grout, oven, extractor, behind the fridge, mattress protectors, curtains. Some managers include these on a cycle, most bill them separately, and if nobody schedules them the apartment degrades quietly until reviews mention it.
Consumables. Coffee, salt, oil, toilet paper, soap, bin bags, light bulbs, batteries for the lock. Individually trivial, collectively a real monthly number, and almost always billed at cost on top of the fee.
Maintenance call-outs. Boilers, water pressure, the tinaco, the intercom, a blocked drain. In a functioning arrangement you agree a peso threshold under which the manager just fixes things and reports afterward, and above which they call you. Without that threshold you either get woken up for a lightbulb or get an invoice you never approved.
Photography and listing setup. A photoshoot, copywriting, and listing build are usually charged once at the start, separately from the ongoing fee. Ask whether it is included, discounted, or billed, and ask who owns the files if you leave. Photos you paid for should be photos you keep.
Furnishing replacements. What you furnished on a budget gets replaced sooner than you planned. Pans warp, a chair breaks, the sofa bed gives up.
Utilities and internet during vacancy. Owners modelling from abroad forget this one most. Internet, gas, electricity, maintenance quota, and property tax run whether or not anyone slept there. A month at low occupancy is not a month at zero cost. For what furnished units in these colonias actually rent for, what a furnished apartment in Mexico City costs is written from the guest side, which is the side that sets your ceiling.
How to read the contract
Read past the fee section. The clauses that matter when the relationship ends are rarely the ones you negotiated when it started.
- Term and notice. How long are you committed, and how much notice does either side give? A long lock-in with a short notice period on their side is not symmetrical.
- Exclusivity. Are you barred from renting the unit yourself, or to a long-term tenant, during the term?
- Owner use. How many nights can you block for yourself, with how much notice, and is there a fee?
- Who owns the listing account. If the listing sits under the manager’s account, so do the reviews, the history, and the search ranking. That history is an asset. Establish whose it is before you build it. Same question for the photos, the copy, and the guest data.
- The maintenance approval threshold. A peso figure, in writing.
- Payout timing. On what cycle do you receive money, and what does the statement itemise? Who holds the security deposit, and how does a damage claim work?
- Pricing authority. Can they discount without asking you? Most competent managers need that freedom to fill a calendar. Just know you granted it.
- What happens to bookings already on the calendar when the contract ends. The ugliest fight in this business. Decide it while everyone is still friendly.
- Invoicing. Can they issue a proper Mexican invoice for their fee? A manager who cannot invoice you correctly is showing you their compliance posture everywhere else. Our corporate housing CFDI guide covers what a valid one contains.
Ask for evidence rather than adjectives: occupancy on comparable units, average length of stay, review scores, and what happened to a unit’s numbers after they took it over. Roma Norte Host publishes its own management results for that reason. Ask whoever you are talking to for the equivalent, and treat a refusal as an answer.
When hiring a manager does not pay for itself
I would rather say this plainly than have you find out in month four.
Management rarely earns its fee when you live in Mexico City and already have the people. A cleaner you trust, a plumber who answers, and the flexibility to meet a guest at midday means a manager is buying you convenience, not revenue. Convenience is a legitimate purchase. Just don’t call it an investment.
It rarely pays on a long-term tenanted unit. One tenant, one contract, twelve months. Almost nothing to manage, and a percentage of that rent is a percentage of rent you would have collected anyway.
It rarely pays on a weak unit in a weak location. A dark studio on a noisy street with no elevator does not become a strong short-term listing because a professional wrote the description. Management multiplies what is there. When the base is thin the multiple is thin, and the fee is fixed.
It rarely pays when you actually enjoy the work. Some owners like hosting: the messages, the recommendations, the review that says the apartment felt like a home. If that is you, a manager is removing the part you wanted.
And it does not pay when the numbers only work at fantasy occupancy. If the arrangement needs an almost-full calendar to beat a long lease, you are one soft season away from paying a fee to run at a loss. Model the weak year. That is the one you are underwriting.
Where it does earn its keep is narrower: an owner outside the country, a unit that genuinely suits short stays, no appetite for becoming a hotelier at 22:00 on a Friday, and a manager whose reporting you can audit. That combination is real and common. It is just not universal, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.
Decision branches
- Live abroad, decent unit in a strong area, want distributions not operations? Full management is probably worth pricing.
- Live in CDMX with reliable cleaner and handyman? Self-manage, or buy co-hosting only for the messaging load.
- One long-term tenant on a twelve-month contract? Skip management entirely.
- Unsure short-term beats a traditional lease? Run that comparison before you interview anyone.
Where to go from here
Collect at least two written proposals, force both into the same format, and compare peso amounts on a shared sample month rather than percentages on a slide. Ask each one what is excluded, who owns the listing, and whether you can see a real owner statement with the numbers blacked out.
Roma Norte Host is the owner-side arm of the same operation behind StayWork CDMX, working in Roma Norte, Condesa, Narvarte, and the colonias around them. Send us the address , the unit type, and what you are currently earning, and you will get an honest read on whether it is worth managing at all. If the answer is no, we will say so. Taking on a unit that shouldn’t be short-term ends badly for both sides.
